37: Manners

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Actually, I’d wanted to ask about Hexacorallia. After the whole capuchin thing it seemed like a bad idea to get all my information from reports and educational videos, and if there were any more surprises on the next ship being hidden-but-not-really, Ella might know and be able to warn e about them. But if she wanted to talk about the capuchins, I wasn’t going to stop her.

“What’s the deal with them?” I asked. “And why are we being quiet, is it a secret?”

“No, not a secret. I just wanted to warn you. There’s been a lot of foreigners on this ship recently and they always ask about the capuchins and some of them can be a bit… well. Look. The capuchins are people aboard this ship, alright? They’re our valued friends and equals. And you can say whatever you like about them on your own ship, but when you’re here, well, I’ve seen foreigners be sharp or judgemental about them and they don’t make a whole lot of friends. If you want to get along with people here, you shouldn’t be rude to or about them.”

“I wasn’t planing on being rude to them,” I said, confused.

“Good. But lots of foreigners say that, and then they’re super rude to them, and get all confused when you point out that the thing they did that would be really rude to a human also counts as rude to a capuchin. So you’ll want to watch out for that.” She stepped back and raised her voice again. “What did you want to know about them?”

Um. Everything? But now I was wondering whether any of my questions were accidentally rude.

“Why are they only here?” I asked. “They seem like they’d be useful on all kinds of ships.”

Ella shrugged. “I don’t think I’ve ever met one that wanted to emigrate anywhere else. Can you blame them? The Stalwart is awesome.”

Was she hiding something? Adding a joke like that sometimes meant that someone was. But I couldn’t always tell, with people I didn’t know that well. Maybe she did just think that all the capuchins wanted to stay on the Stalwart, so nobody else got a chance to have any whether they wanted them or not. Which… might be true? Probably not, though. They were a whole third of the ships population, and they were supposed to be almost as smart as us, and none of them ever wanted to leave the ship? I didn’t know enough about them to be sure, like maybe there was something about the Stalwart that other ships didn’t have that they just naturally really liked or needed, but that was a big group of people to all agree on something.

“Why don’t other ships birth their own?” I asked. “The Courageous sticks to Earth genesets, but plenty of other ships have heavily engineered people. Why don’t they have capuchins?”

“Maybe some of them do,” Ella shrugged. “Or something like them. Not our capuchins, obviously.”

I hadn’t even thought of that. Were there other not-human people on other ships? Maybe. “Why not yours?”

“They wouldn’t be able to get the right genes. Our capuchins are based on Earth capuchins, but they’re very, very heavily modified. It took a lot of research and a lot of experimentation to design their genes, and I’m pretty sure we’re the only ship in this part of the fleet that has those genes. The others all left in the last fleet split.”

“But what do you mean, other ships don’t have the genes? Any ship can make genes if they know the sequence, can’t they? Can’t they just get the sequence off you?”

Ella shook her head. “The capuchins would never tell them. Humans don’t have access to that; only capuchins can access their engineered geneset database.”

“Why can’t humans see it?”

“Why would we need to? They make their own babies, the same as we make ours.”

That definitely sounded a bit like she was hiding something. Was I imagining it?

“Why wouldn’t the capuchins share it with other ships? Has anyone asked?”

Another shrug. “That’s just what they’re like.”

Oh, yeah. Definitely hiding something.

Much more importantly, did I care? I didn’t see how whatever trouble humanity was facing could have anything to do with the capuchins, so digging into it was a waste of time. On the other hand, something in it did nag at me. Was I just weirded out by them? Or were they somehow involved? They kept their DNA secret, they kept to one ship – were they hiding some kind of dark secret, something that put humanity in danger?

No, that couldn’t be right. There was nothing that a group on one tiny ship could do to put the whole fleet in danger. And even if they could, the capuchins couldn’t have existed longer than the Stalwart itself, so most of the colonies had been settled long, long before they were invented, and were far out of reach. It just wasn’t possible for them to be a danger to them.

Besides, I was trying to find new perspectives to figure out something I already knew. I’d never heard of capuchins before this journey.

The capuchins didn’t matter, and I couldn’t get distracted.

“What’s Hexacorallia like?” I asked.

“Pella says it’s pretty much how the reports describe it,” Ella said. “Instead of one big ship, it’s a bunch of small chambers that drift along together as a cloud. They can dock with each other to transfer goods or people or whatever or temporarily become larger ships. Right now it’s all horribly wasteful, because they have to propel themselves about and it wastes a lot more fuel than if they were all one solid mass moving in one direction, but that won’t be a problem in orbit, when they can use solar sails and tether to asteroids to correct velocity. It’s an interesting political experiment as well as a physical one; a decentralised ship, like a fractal fleet.”

I didn’t know what ‘decentralised’ meant, but I didn’t want to say so, so I just nodded. “And it’s a zero pull ship.”

“Yes. It wouldn’t make sense to spin all those tiny pods. Mechanically speaking, it’s a good design for settling a dense asteroid field.”

“Farin?” a stranger’s voice called as the door to the lab opened.

Ella tried not to look too obviously irritated. “Yes, Chi?”

“Do you have those leaf permeability measurements yet?”

“No, Chi. I’ve been giving a tour to some of our guests.”

The speaker, in the doorway now, crossed her arms. She was a short woman with a round face, wearing the same sort of jumpsuit as Ella but with a huge gold brooch on her collar. I squinted at it. It was a big flower of some kind, complicated and old-looking. Probably decoration, not a sign of rank or anything; rank insignia tended to be pretty simple so that they could be easily recognised.

“Really?” she asked. “It looks like you’re just standing around chatting. I’ll take over your tour so that you can get your work done.” She smiled at me, and it looked like a real smile. She was mad at Ella, not me. “Hi there. I’m Sammo.”

I didn’t want to be dragged around the lab again by this woman. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Taya. Thanks for showing me around, Ella; like I was saying, I need to catch up with my sister.”

“No problem, Taya. Come back any time.” She glanced at Sammo. “It was easily the best part of my day.”

I got out of there before I could get trapped in whatever was going on between them.

So the ship was making space plants to grow in asteroids for the new colony. Interesting. Weird, actually. It seemed like an odd thing for a ship that was so obsessed with efficiency to do; with all their computers and tight spaces and stuff, I thought they’d be working on something mechanical. Plants seemed messy and slow.

But I was learning that ‘efficiency’ meant different things for different people. Maybe it being weird was the point. After all, we didn’t want all of our colonies to be the same, did we? If there was a problem in the way that we built them, and we built them all the same, then that problem could wipe out everything! Better to make lots of different types of colonies at different stars, all different in as many ways as we could manage. Maybe the people of the Stalwart were hoping that Hexacorallia and their plants and everything being so different from the previous colony would be the thing that would convince the fleet to use their proposal for the Dragonseye.

I was so busy thinking to myself that I almost didn’t notice the two people chatting to each other outside the bedroom across from mine.

“Obviously, a fully organic system would be ideal, but it’s simply not a realistic goal,” a woman in a faded red wrap was saying. “The radiation shielding is the least of dozens of issues when trying to get plants to live in space. The main problem is the temperature. Plants don’t possess much of an ability to melt asteroid ice to drink, especially when they’re just planted and have no energy to spare; you need mechanical heaters for that. And dispersing heat is an even more complicated problem; they can do that into the air pocket through their leaves no problem, of course, but how are they supposed to cool the air pocket itself without venting any gases into space? There’s simply no way to avoid mechanical cooling, which means human setup and maintenance of equipment for every plant.”

“If we’re having the plants alter their transparency for radiation shielding anyway,” said her companion, a brennan in a white wrap, “then using the shadows of the asteroids and black body radiation – ”

“It’s a plat, not a spaceship! There’s too much variation in the asteroid shapes and rotations to realistically expect organic responses to – oh, hello there!” The woman smiled at me.

These two must be the Arborean scientists. “Hi.”

She glanced at my hair. “You’re from another ship, too. Are you one of the Courageous visitors? Here on your jaunt?”

“I’m here with my sister.”

“That’s nice! I’m Aloe. This is Sorrel.”

“Pleased to meet you. I’m – ”

“Taya!” Hali barrelled int the hall, out of breath. “Come quick!”

“What’s wrong?!”

He doubled over, panting. “Nothing! Nothing’s wrong. But you should come quick.”

“Why?!”

“I just found the coolest place on the ship.”

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